How to build your growth (marketing) strategy

Part 1 of 3 in growth strategy series. Don’t pick channels & campaigns without going through these exercises

Oct 24, 2023

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We’re in the midst of annual planning season, aka the time of year where many teams spend a whole bunch of time planning and then never look at those plans again.

There’s no better time for me to share my thoughts on building a high-impact growth strategy–and what exercises you should go through that will actually lead you to the right growth marketing plan for your business.

As I began writing this newsletter, I realized this is a 3 parter.

Part 1: What drives your growth marketing strategy? In this newsletter

This newsletter focuses on all the inputs you need to look (at least) annually to lay the foundation for your strategy.

Understanding the 4 high-level ways to drive growth
Analyzing and understanding the 3 marketing strategy drivers (your inputs)
Identifying and making room for big bets

Part 2: What growth levers should you choose?

Next month’s newsletter will help you actually pick the channels and campaigns you should focus on—aka how to make a plan you’ll actually look at regularly.

Choosing channels
Planning campaigns
Prioritizing across your funnel & segments

Part 3: Running marketing campaigns

Strategic inputs for prioritizing growth channels and campaigns

Thanks to our (highly-curated) sponsors

We only include sponsors when we’ve received a positive recommendation from the MKT1 community or our portfolio companies—or when we’ve used the product or service ourselves.

Ten Speed Agency - Content & SEO

Ten Speed is a content optimization agency for early and growth-stage SaaS companies like Bitly, Workvivo, and Visible. We dive into your marketing strategy, find low-hanging fruit, and grow your awareness, engagement, and MRR with proven SEO strategies and revenue-focused content.

Why MKT1 recommends Ten Speed: We’ve been referring Ten Speed to our portfolio companies for a couple years now—long before they decided to sponsor our newsletter. We recommend them over other content & SEO agencies because they understand the value of repurposing existing content. If you want to drive more organic growth from content & SEO, reach out to Ten Speed. They’ll help you turn it up to 11 (←This is Spinal Tap movie reference was not approved by Ten Speed, but I’m going with it)

MKT1 Discount: Mention MKT1 Newsletter to get $1,000 off your first month if you start with Ten Speed before the end of 2023.

42 Agency - Demand Gen & RevOps

42 Agency is a trusted growth partner for B2B SaaS companies—including startups in the MKT1 Capital portfolio. Our agency helps startups with Demand Generation & RevOps to hit aggressive pipeline targets.

Why MKT1 recommends 42 Agency: If you want to implement growth initiatives, reach out to 42 Agency. They’ll be true strategic partners and a pleasure to work with.

RevenueHero

RevenueHero is the easiest way for marketers to qualify and route leads to sales rep’s calendar, right in your demo request flow, in email sequences, and sales hand-offs. Marketers and sales teams love RevenueHero’s built in meeting hand-off, routing logs, native integrations with the GTM stack, custom branding, and insights at every step of the conversion funnel.

Why MKT1 recommends RevenueHero: When it comes to growth strategy, don’t just focus on top of funnel—you also need to increase conversion. We discovered RevenueHero when we wrote a newsletter on improving demo request flows a couple months back. Now we recommend them every time. If you don’t have a book a meeting step in your conversion flow, go check them out.

Offer: Mention MKT1 for 15% off, for MKT1 subscribers who close by the end of Dec 2023.

1. Understand the 4 high-level ways to drive growth

Before you start trying random channels, launching campaigns, and making random landing pages, you should understand your company’s highest leverage way to drive growth right now.

The good news: There are really only four high-level ways to grow revenue. And since I like dessert—and I like pi(e) related frameworks—here’s how I think about these 4 levers:

How to use this framework

In this (over?)extended metaphor, pie = market or market segment

Each quarter, prioritize these high-level levers (just don’t try to say that phrase out loud when you do). Your priorities will likely change quarter over quarter.

Hypothetically, you could focus too much on going after new markets one quarter, so your growth in proven markets stalls. The following quarter, you should swing back around to focusing on that lever as your top priority. Or you could drive so much new web traffic in a quarter that you realize you desperately need to fix your leaky bucket before you continue to accelerate top of funnel growth. Whatever the case may be, it’s important to have these prioritized—and get buy in on these priorities across your company.

Each lever lends itself to a specific strategy. Here's the high-level strategy for each:

Expand the pie (or test new pies)

Go after new markets or segments (verticals, geos, etc.).
Note: If you’re very early-stage, you likely won’t have an existing market or audience segment you’re successfully selling to, so expanding the pie really just means testing new segments to try to find product/market fit.
Sometimes when moving to new markets you can use the same channels you already use to drive growth; other times you need to try completely new channels (i.e. add in outbound or partner marketing).
Create new "fuel" (content, messaging) tailored to the new “pie”.
Test new markets or segments first before going all in (i.e. try paid search and a tailored landing page or try outbound driving to a webinar with speakers from the same segment).
To determine if you should double down on this market or segment, make sure you have similar or higher conversion rates throughout the funnel (even though the sample size might be small). Once you get to this point, expand your efforts.
Once you can drive higher full-funnel conversion at a larger scale, expand your efforts in this market even more. More on testing & scaling below.

Capture more of the same pie

Continue to expand on what’s working, while adding in tests and big bet projects to jolt growth.
Watch out for diminishing returns, especially on paid efforts when you’ve been going after the same market for a while (especially if it’s a niche market).
Just don’t wait too long to expand from your original pie; it may take longer than you think to expand.

Capture new pie more efficiently

This method is related to capturing more of the same pie, but involves driving more revenue with the same amount of top of funnel volume.
When top of funnel stays the same, but you improve conversion rates, revenue goes up.
When the budget stays the same, but you lower your customer acquisition cost or increase the quality of leads, you can drive more volume for the same cost. Revenue goes up.
Increase conversion rates AND decrease acquisition costs and you're really cooking with gas (to mix metaphors just a bit).
Focus on improving web conversion, sign up or request a demo flow conversion, and optimize paid efforts to drive growth in this way.

Get more money from your slice of the pie

Drive more revenue from existing customers (or soon to be customers) by promoting new features or changing perceived value through messaging or social proof.
Expand revenue per account by driving customers to pay for new features, increase the number of seats, or increase product usage. Lifecycle marketing, in-product marketing, and well executed product launches are the best way to do this.
You can also expand revenue per account by raising prices, this will impact new customers too. It’s hard to do this without increasing perceived value (especially when your audience is tech companies in this economy).

2. Understand the 3 marketing strategy drivers for your company

Once you understand the core way(s) you’ll drive growth, you can start to plan how you’ll do it. To effectively plan for high-impact growth, you need to do some foundational work first.

Much like you do positioning to help drive your marketing “fuel” (content, messaging, etc), you need to spend some time doing some foundational work to build the right “engine”.

To build your growth marketing foundation:

Make sure you’ve mapped your funnel and identified your KPIs (key performance indicators). I wrote about this recently. And don’t forget to track conversion rates–or you’ll never know if you need to focus on capturing your pie more efficiently!
Prioritize the 4 high-level ways to grow (what you just read about in section 1)
Deeply understand—what we at MKT1 call—the 3 strategy drivers. Focus on things you can be great at and remember not to follow another company’s playbook.
Pick a strategy that fits with your stage business, your audience, your market, your GTM motion, and your advantages.

These drivers are helpful for figuring out not only your growth marketing strategy, but your content strategy too. So at least 2x per year, make sure you analyze these inputs.

The drivers diagram is in a purposeful order:

Product marketing research should help inform your GTM motion
Both product marketing research and GTM motion help you identify your marketing advantages

Here’s how analyzing each of these areas guides your growth strategy:

A. Build your strategy around product marketing research (aka audience, market, and product research)

For more on the role of product marketing, here’s an early MKT1 Newsletter on the role of product marketing.

When marketing your startup, you must know what matters to your specific audience. But understanding your audience isn’t enough, you also need to understand who else is in your ecosystem. And not just competitors but also complementary companies who can help you drive growth. This research helps inform your positioning, audience segmentation, channel selection, and campaign planning.

Some things to keep in mind when using product marketing research to drive your strategy:

Marketers often focus audience analysis just on firmographics. It’s important to understand your audience qualitatively too. Make sure you understand everything about your audience’s workday, including where they get information and other tools they use. Here’s a simple example:
- Your audience might be super active in a specific Facebook group (sorry to blow your Gen Z mind w/ the Facebook reference). Learning which specific Facebook groups or communities can unlock new channels for you.
- Your audience might do a lot of work in spreadsheets, but not have great templates for those spreadsheets. Once you find out what these are, you can make spreadsheet templates for your audience.
Don’t stop at competitive analysis, map your entire ecosystem. These ecosystem “players” might be able to help you grow faster. Some examples:
- Agencies or consultancies might be a great source of referrals or even a sales channel.
- Complementary products or integration partners may not have help videos, despite heavy search traffic for that content. You can make how-to-videos about their product quickly using tools like Loom & Descript to capture some of their search traffic.

Doing this work will make certain growth channels obvious, and also help you check some channels that aren’t a good fit off your list.

B. Select a strategy that aligns with your go-to-market motion

Deep dive into how your GTM motion impacts your marketing strategy overall in this newsletter.

Growth marketing at a B2B company with a self-serve motion compared to a sales-led motion is a different job–almost as different as B2C and B2B. Given this, your growth marketing strategy and tactics need to be 100% aligned with your GTM motion.

Typically, startups determine their purchase process (self-serve, sales-led, or hybrid) based on a few business attributes like deal size, total addressable market, time to close, audience, and how teams adopt the product (bottom up or top down). These same attributes also tend to dictate the channels that will be most successful for acquiring, nurturing, converting, and expanding customers.

Notes on growth strategy for sales-led startups:

Generally speaking, sales-led startups will use outbound (to prospects who haven’t yet come inbound) as a top of funnel channel. Sales-led startups typically do this in conjunction with some inbound.
If you’ve opted for a purely sales-led motion, you are likely going after large contracts and you have a list of target accounts.
When this is the case, it makes a lot of sense to do outbound and potentially account-based marketing towards these target accounts.
Remember to not make the only CTA “want to schedule a meeting?” when you do outbound. Provide value with content, templates & tools, or an educational webinar.

Notes on growth strategy for self-serve / PLG startups:

Typically, startups that allow customers to sign up and/or purchase self-serve rely on inbound channels more so than outbound.
If you have a self-serve or product-led growth motion, you’re typically going after a higher volume of lower contract value deals.
Meaning, you have not identified everyone in your addressable market, and you want to cast a wide net.
When you have a free product or self-serve upgrade path, you can nurture users using the product itself. This is a huge advantage over sales-led businesses that don’t offer a free or low-cost product to their prospects and have to rely on email only to nurture prospects into customers.

These are of course generalizations, and most B2B startups today have some sort of hybrid motion. The point is, your GTM motion is a great place to start to determine which channels to use. You may also discover in this process that your GTM motion isn’t the right fit for your business characteristics and audience. And that’s a much larger conversation and a whole other newsletter.

C. Identify and accelerate your marketing advantages

Deep dive into marketing advantages in this newsletter, which includes definitions for each advantage

Marketing advantages (an MKT1™ framework) are dynamics in a company’s DNA, product, or market that inherently drive growth. Think of these as tailwinds or catalysts for growth. Once you identify these, it’s obvious where to focus the bulk of your marketing efforts.

At MKT1, we are obsessed with marketing advantages. As we’ve written about, we built our entire fund, MKT1 Capital, on the thesis that startups can’t win without identifying their marketing advantages and accelerating them. So it’s really critical to identify, unlock, and lean into these advantages when planning your growth marketing activities—aka don’t skip this part!

Notes on identifying your marketing advantages:

Remember: Understanding the other 2 drivers (product marketing research & your GTM motion) first helps you identify your marketing advantages.

We break advantages into 3 categories, based on where the advantage comes from and the high-level strategies that typically work to accelerate the advantage (your product, your ecosystem, your marketing or company story).

If your startup doesn’t have marketing advantages, you need to adjust your product, your business strategy, or your go-to-market approach. They are that critical to your success.
Some advantages are stronger than others:
- Network effects, when accelerated properly, are perhaps the strongest advantage.
- Becoming synonymous with a category can have a massive impact on your business, but is a really risky path to pursue and just doesn’t work for many startups.
- Gaining a wedge in through a niche audience, and then using that first audience to get to future audiences can be really powerful—but only when the product strategy is very aligned (which is why it falls into the product category).
- If you have the same marketing advantages as a competitor, they’re not really advantages–leaning into them becomes table stakes.
Some advantages tend to come in pairs:
- I.e If you have a network effect, you typically have a free plan to get that network effect going
- I.e. If you are trying to create a new category, typically there’s a trend that’s driving the need for that category and educational content will be highly in demand.

Once you identify your advantage(s), choose channels and campaigns to accelerate your advantage(s):

Identify advantages (keeping in mind the points above) and make sure there’s cross company alignment on these.
Build a marketing plan to accelerate each advantage, follow guidance in the diagram’s orange columns on strategy and pick marketing channels that make the most sense.
Read more about the startups mentioned and what they did related to each advantage–but remember you can’t just copy and paste these company’s strategies.
- I.e. Research Hubspot and Shopify’s affiliate programs
- I.e. Research how Square and Toast developed initial products in more niche markets (or really any vertical SaaS startup that got really, really huge later)
- I.e. Look at how Figma encouraged internal and external sharing and then layered on community templates, etc.
Keep your advantage(s) in mind not just when choosing growth tactics, but also when creating “fuel” or content to feed your growth engine.

More from MKT1

✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find all templates here, including spreadsheets to help bridge the gap between strategy drivers and tactics and select your growth levers and channels.

🧑‍🚀 Job board: See roles from the MKT community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free.

📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which includes how to use your growth inputs to change your growth trajectory and 50 questions to help you identify your step-change drivers.